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iSixSigma Magazine is conducting research on Six Sigma certification requirements. With your help we’ll get to the bottom of the certification issues that hover over the industry. While there may be no formal standards, different companies have different methods and requirements for certification of their Green Belts, Black Belts and Master Black Belts. Please take […]

If you haven’t secured your own 2008 Cox-Box Wall Calendar, it may be too late. Get them now at https://www.isixsigma.com/calendar/

In his Rough Type blog, Nicholas Carr — contrarian author of the book, Does IT Matter? — comments on Microsoft’s plans to build a data center in Siberia and upcoming completion of the world’s largest data center in Chicago. Construction of these facilities costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and each will hold tends of […]

(Movie Review – WARNING! May contain spoilers…) At the beginning of the movie, the Santa Claus who is scheduled to appear in the Thanksgiving Day Parade is found to have significant defects. He is replaced with a worker who seems to utilizestandard work, Sensei Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn). The new Senseiyields improved results for the […]

The Cox-Box is Copyright © 2000-2007 iSixSigma LLC and Gary P. Cox – All Rights ReservedReproduction Without Permission Is Prohibited – Request Permission Order Your 2008 Cox-Box Calendar Online Now! Go to https://www.isixsigma.com/calendar/

I recently came across a fairly newblog in the “business improvement” universe…Sith Sigma. It’s the rantings and ravings of a couple of infamous Sith Lords, Darth Sidious and Darth Vader. They offer plenty of entertaining but solid advice on Leadership, motivation and project management. The blog has nothing to do with Six Sigma directly, butthe […]

My last blog discussed elevating the strategic relevance of Lean, Six Sigma and process excellence. My view is that mature Process Excellence Organizations enjoy or achieve credibility and success by executing a flexible performance-improvement process attacking the top priorities, employing the best tools, selecting the right projects and leveraging organizational momentum. The first thing mature […]

Isn’t it ironic that what might actually be needed to address variation in your process is variation in your team? Picking the right team members is almost as important as picking the right project. In addition to an expert, a customer and representatives from other key stakeholder groups, you should think about how you can […]

I have had the fortune to serve twice on the ASQ’s International Team Excellence Awards judging panel. It’s not the entries that I want to talk about, but the experience of serving on the panel. The details of the competition and the criteria are posted on the ASQ website, www.asq.org. When I volunteered to serve […]

Ever wonder what a Six Sigma Thanksgiving would be like? Here’s a glimpse . . . 99.9997% of the turkey would get eaten so you don’t have to eat turkey sandwiches every day for the next two weeks 99.9997% of the mashed potatoes won’t have lumps 99.9997% of the desserts taste great and have no […]

Order Your 2008 Cox-Box Calendar Online Now! Go to https://www.isixsigma.com/calendar/ The Cox-Box is Copyright © 2000-2007 iSixSigma LLC and Gary P. Cox – All Rights ReservedReproduction Without Permission Is Prohibited – Request Permission

“Donuts. Is there anything they can’t do?” Homer Simpson would be proud of Maidstone Bakeries. Striving for the perfect donut. According the a press release: Maidstone produces more than 60 million donuts per week and wanted to ensure top quality while making sure its production operations were as efficient as possible. Maidstone is using Six […]

A conversation I regularly get into involves discussion of the difficulties encountered when deploying Six Sigma in an environment that is already saturated with other programs and toolsets. A majority percentage of the time the discussion is about deploying Six Sigma in an area where Lean is already well established, but there are many other […]

When my fellow Black Belts and I facilitate, or teach, we ask the participants to give us feedback at the end of each session. We use the plus-delta format that we inherited from our original consultants, by dividing a flip-chart page into two columns for the “plusses” (things that worked well, were meaningful, or strengths) […]

iSixSigma launched a new website last week, Six Sigma in the Military, complete with stories about how the U.S. Military is using Six Sigma. The purpose of this iSixSigma Military channel is to document the transformation of the United States Armed Services through the use of Lean Six Sigma and related process improvement methodologies. Ronald […]

This training video was made for CISCO by the Creative Learning Studio. It’s an entertaining explanation of process improvement as told by a fictitious news station in need of better proceses. DMAIC gets a plug as a way to achieve improved processes. Enjoy.

Whether it’s a Six Sigma deployment, a project, a training class or metrics, one variable stands out as the ultimate gauge of success: Business Line-of-Site. Yes, I meant “Site” not “Sight.” It’s more than just seeing the path to the destination. It’s about actively targeting it. When you are passionate about something, it is easy […]

If Fort Wayne Indiana is the Six Sigma City, we just might see a Six Sigma County on the horizon…if Christopher C. Collins is elected as the Erie County Executive. He believes that good government can be achieved through good business. The Buffalo News reports: Collins’ candidacy is built on his remarkable success in turning […]

It’s Halloween and what could possibly be scarier than monsters and goblins? Here’s a top ten list of frightening Six Sigma moments that might send chills up your spine! Number 10: Having the network go down when you are on question 49 of 50 of your online Black Belt exam. Number 9: Being in the […]

Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a driving value that determines the amount of waste and what adjustments need to be made to the service or manufacturing process to achieve more efficiency and thus more value to the customer. To the extent that a service satisfies the customer the service is valued. A satisfied customer […]

Jack Welch in an interview talks about what it means to be a Six Sigma Company alongsideJack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) and his take onSix Sigma. Enjoy.

Like many companies in the Fortune 1000, we are planning 2008. At leadership meetings, around conference room tables and in hallway conversations, we are asking big questions: What will our industry look like? How will external trends affect us? How should our business model change? What capabilities do we need? Do we have them? What […]

Hours . . . Days . . . Weeks . . . Months . . . Years . . . Seems like some Six Sigma projects drag on forever. But the question here is not how long does it take to complete a project because that really depends on the project scope. The real question […]

Each company probably would have strategized targets to achieve on annually. In Starwood they are know as Big 5’s. Big 5’s are tactical targets that support the company’s global initiatives and global objectives; normally a mixture of financial and non-financial but measurable targets. These targets ‘flow down’ from divisional presidents’ offices’ to area directors and […]

My last article discussed the importance of verifying the sustainability of project work.Although there are many positives to living in a Six Sigma world, it does have a dark side- failed project audits. My experience, dependent on my employer at the time, has been that anywhere from 10-50% of projects are not embedded into an […]

Most of us are familiar with the DMAIC approach to Six Sigma.But what happens after control phase is completed? The answer is verification. A lot of hard work has gone into the project and as a project leader you need to be able to walk away from an improvement that is embedded and is meeting […]

Some of our Black Belts were talking the other day about how many projects they’ve got going, and (in spite of focusing our projects on specific value streams) how they sometimes feel pretty fragmented, getting pulled from project to project. We discussed whether it would be reasonableto pause for a short while, to ensure that […]

Many companies look to Six Sigma to help them transform. They constantly talk of “weaving Six Sigma into the fabric of the company,” “having Six Sigma become part of their DNA” and “fundamentally changing the way they work.” These are all nice wugga words but without a real vision of what they want to transform […]

There is just no end to the kinds of business problems Six Sigma is able to help solve. A news release picked up by CNNMoney.com, Forbes.com as well as others websites discusses a unique application of Six Sigma at Raytheon… A team of Raytheon Six Sigma(TM) experts used the Raytheon Six Sigma process to validate […]

Instead of hiring the usual ethnographers or consultants, Westin owner Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. turned to Six Sigma, a management process known for reducing defects and increasing efficiency.

To: Executive Sponsor From: Six Sigma Black Belt Re: Lean Six Sigma Project #1031 Our Define Report-Out is now ready for presentation. This memo serves as an executive summary for your review. Customers: Children (primary), Parents (indirect) Problem Statement: Too many children in the United States receive Halloween candy in a way that is unpredictable. […]

Earlier this year Elizabeth M. Ferrarini at Enterprise Leadership interviewed Gerald Shields, CIO for AFLAC. EL: What best practices do you use for IT? GS: We have a couple of people who are Black-Belt certified in Six Sigma, and we use Six Sigma for some projects. Our primary best practice is the Capability Maturity Model […]

Just got back from Philadelphia where I spoke at a conference on how to design a training strategy to support organization-wide Six Sigma learning. Entitled “Gearing Up for Success,” it focused on the linkage that must always be maintained between the training strategy/curriculum and business objectives. Without this, it’s easy for training to become disconnected […]

Having worked on many process improvement projects across multiple SBU’s in my organization in the Sri-Lankan apparel industry, a primary factor that determines the success or failure of any project is the level of cultural acceptance and support a project or practitioner receives from various levels of an organization. Overtime the Sri-Lankan apparel industry has […]

The first time I watched Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957) was four years back, at a Six Sigma leadership workshop. We were only 3 days into a two week long training, and some of us were already stretched to optimal stress levels. Being a bit more of an action buff, and being after a […]

Let me end the suspense: not to p. At least for me. Also not to F. And not to t. I got thinking about this topic after reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about “sloppy analysis” in scientific studies. That article is here, but you’ll have to pay to see it. However, the […]

Customer relationship, customer insight, customer retention, customer proposition, customer experience, customer journey, customer-centric, customer analytics, customer loyalty, customer value, customer satisfaction, customer equity, customer intelligence, customer contact strategy……the poor customer they have been so slice-n-diced by so many people over so many years they must be a messy pile of little cubes on the floor. […]

Yes, the Six Sigma community has its own cartoon strip. We even have our share of corporate M&A excitement with recent acquisitions (Accenture and Oracle). But where are the good old fashioned MTV music and videos for the Six Sigma community? If you love mullets and buck-teeth, you’re going to love “The MiniTab Song” by […]

We’re used to seeking the Voice of the Customer in the Define phase of our projects. Typically (at least at our organization) we haven’t asked, “How much of this process can we pass on to you?” This topic usually comes upwhen weteach a lean exercise in which the Voice of the Customeris supposed to rule. […]

A common way to learn principles or tools is to associate a word as an acronym. The seven/eight wastes of Lean is a great example of acronymic variation. I’ve come across five different words invented to illustrate the wastes of Lean: The iSixSigma dictionary uses the word DOTWIMP to list the seven wastes of Lean […]

I believe Deming may have said something in this area, but given I couldn’t find a famous quote I made one up. 80% of business issues come from the process and only 20% from the people who work at the business If someone told me that, I’d say, No!Look at the things people do that […]

Like many organizations, ours began their Six Sigma deployment with a consultant-based training and project mentorship. We were successful at internalizing the training, and we’ve used a value-stream approach to selecting improvement projects, but the process owners never seemed to be the ones to light the fire – most wait to be tapped on the […]

“We’re not in Kansas anymore.” Recognize this line? Made famous by the movie “The Wizard of Oz,” it fittingly describes the feeling you get when you suddenly realize that things have changed. How can change happen so fast that we get caught off guard? Even Dorothy saw the twister coming. I recently had a “Kansas […]

One thing I really like about the government Six Sigma initiatives is the public sharing of information. The DOD units are so proud to talk about how they are using Six Sigma and the benefits they are getting out of it. The Indian Head Division of NAVSEA has an entire website dedicated to Lean Six […]

If your company is like iSixSigma, you’ve probably read about Net Promoter Score (NPS) and thought it was a very cool topic. (For those of you who haven’t, you can read our iSixSigma Magazine cover story “Are Your Customers Promoting You…Or Do You Have to Do It Yourself?” in the Nov/Dec 2006 issue.) Net Promoter […]

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released recently a study of Lean adoption at nine manufactured housing plants. HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research and the Manufactured Housing Research Alliance were sponsors of the study. The study highlights the benefits of Lean to making production of manufacturing housing more efficient and improving […]